Great joy on all sides. The Greenlandic author Niviaq Korneliussen has received the most important literary prize of the Northern European countries, the Nordic Council’s literary prize. This was the first time in its almost 60-year history that the award went to Greenland. That was not only overdue in terms of cultural policy, but is also more than well-deserved in literary terms. In her award-winning novel “Naasuliardarpi” (“The Valley of Flowers”), which was published in 2020 in the author’s own translation into Greenlandic and Danish, Korneliussen tells with great emotional force about one of the biggest problems in Greenland: Every year, people commit in the country With a population of around 56,000, so many people have committed suicide that Greenland has the highest suicide rate in the world. In 2019 there were 45, mostly young people, who took their own lives.
This number, 45, makes Cornelussen the central structuring element of her novel. Relentlessly he counts down from 45 to 1, the last of the narrated deaths, the death of the first-person narrator, who remains nameless. The first suicide, number 45, is rendered in three cold words: “Woman. 38 years old. Hanged.” Then we learn step by step more about the individual fates, although not necessarily more about the respective backgrounds. But precisely therein lies the strength of this peculiarly haunting novel. In short sentences, which always lead straight to the core of what is meant, the social and personal needs of the people in the post-colonial Greenlandic society are told without giving us any further explanations or even evaluations of the deed.
As readers, we come closest to the young first-person narrator who is preparing to study anthropology in Aarhus, Denmark, but then falls in love with Maliina, a woman from the small town of Tasiilaq in East Greenland. When Maliina’s cousin commits suicide, the couple spontaneously flies to East Greenland. Here the narrator, who comes from the capital Nuuk, gets to know an unknown world of bizarre beauty and foreign culture, to which she feels drawn.
All hopes are on Denmark, where people look contemptuously at the Greenlanders
When she visits the flower valley, a place surrounded by high icebergs, where flowers bloom in the short Greenlandic summer and in winter blue, red and pink plastic flowers glow in the snow on the graves of the small cemetery, she is overcome with an angry death wish. Why live in a world in which your own life seems to count for nothing, the government does not take the problems seriously and hope is directed towards a life in Denmark, in which Greenlanders are considered lazy, drunk and primitive?
Korneliussen’s novel gives an idea of how Greenlanders look at Danes and Danes at Greenlanders. And Greenland women on each other. These looks are seldom beautiful and understanding. But told so strongly and touchingly that through all the anger and despair, the prejudices and dark thoughts, an irrepressible lust for life, for experience, friendship, love and desire becomes visible.
The fact that Niviaq Korneliussen, born in 1990, is an author who is able to strike the tone of her generation in terse dialogues and still meaningful scenes, she has already shown in her first novel, “Homo sapienne”. Released in Greenland and Denmark in 2014, and published in German in 2016 by the Viennese publishing house Zaglossus under the title “Nuuk #ohne Filter”, Korneliussen lets us take part in the lives of five young queer people from Nuuk who share their wit, anger and world pain Try to create a place in life. In “Das Blumental” the perspective widens. We get an insight into the different social classes, generations and traditions of a country that is still trying to assert itself against Danish supremacy.
Niviaq Korneliussen: Naasuliardarpi. Milik Publishing, Nuussuaq 2020. 316 pages.
The fact that the novel was honored as the most important work in Northern European literature in 2021 also has a special political significance. 300 years after the arrival of the Norwegian-Danish pastor Hans Egede in Greenland, with whom the missionary work and colonization of Greenland began, in 2021 the question of how to deal with the event will be particularly fierce. The year before, triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement, the statue Egedes, which was prominently placed in the colonial port of Nuuk, was sprayed with red paint and labeled “Decolonize”.
Many wanted to have the statue shipped to the museum, but ultimately a majority of Nuuk’s residents voted to leave it in its original location. The discussion about the colonial legacy does not end there. Korneliussen’s novel will do its part to keep them alive.